Corporate Learning Team Revitalizes Virtual Training
A key word for Human Resources is “belonging,” as in giving associate a sense of belonging within the worldwide Exchange team. It’s a word that HR’s corporate learning team is taking to heart.
“For 2022, we’re focusing on developing and creating a better environment for virtual learning,” said Samantha Davis, Chief of Corporate Learning. “More than anything, we’re working on the environment we’re learning in, where learners will feel comfortable with virtual courses but feel like they’re getting the same results as they would in a classroom.”
The corporate learning 2022 training calendar includes new training opportunities such as Supervisors—Leading for the First Time; and curricula in Branch/Express Facility Management and Operations Management, each of which have four modules, targeting different job levels.
“As a new team manager in the Exchange Credit Program, I found the information on building confidence, building trust, practicing active listening and involving team members to be very useful,” said Judy Foster, Customer Contact Team manager, who took the Managers—Leading at the Next Level course. “I have already enrolled in several other virtual classes to continue to educate myself and use that knowledge to lead my team.”
All classes are via Microsoft Teams, although associates register via LEX. The virtual learning not only reaches associates wherever they are, it saves money for the Exchange.
“At the end of last year, we launched a virtual Branch/Express class,” said Denise Lundie, core learning manager. “We used to travel to the field and have a class for two or three days; we’re now providing that in a virtual environment. We’re launching the operations manager virtual class as well. We can minimize expense and still take the training to our associates where they need it, only in a virtual environment.”
Davis and Lundie, both of whom joined HR in February 2021, know about being in the field: Davis was General Manager at the Fort Hood Exchange, and Lundie was Main Store Manager at Germany’s Grafenwoehr Exchange. For corporate learning, they created focus groups and relied on them for insight on what training was needed, but they also rely on people they worked with in the field.
“We’ve been reaching out to former store teammates to ask, ‘What do you need? What are you missing?’,” Davis said.
Besides corporate training classes, in 2021 HR launched “microlearning” emails—learning nuggets that could be read in 90 seconds or less—to the worldwide team. These have continued in 2022.
“We’ve been studying how people learn virtually and how they absorb information,” Davis said. “Millennials really enjoy microlearning, these little tidbits of learning that we send out, so we’re going to continue that monthly.”
Microlearning topics have included food safety, meeting customer needs, management development and more. The microlearning emails include links to deeper training on each subject.
“We’re trying to select topics so that anyone who works for the Exchange can say, ‘Maybe this connects with me,’” Lundie said. “We try to get a real snapshot. When it pops up in an associate’s inbox, it’s an interesting picture with no more than five or six lines of information.”
Davis and Lundie know it can be a challenge to get the attention of busy associates who already receive a blur of emails. But they say it’s vital that associates read the training messages, whether they’re for a two-hour corporate learning course or a 90-second microlearning nugget.
“It never seems like it’s the right time for training—but it is,” Lundie said. “It’s building our teams, building our experience. We’ve been through a couple of years of pandemic, and training is really important. We have a lot of new people in new positions, and they need opportunities to learn.”
